ars--booms of Wilde, of Synge, of
Donne, of Dostoevsky! On the whole, no doubt, they do more good than harm.
They create a vivid enthusiasm for literature that affects many people who
might not otherwise know that to read a fine book is as exciting an
experience as going to a horse-race. Hundreds of people would not have the
courage to sit down to read a book like _The Brothers Karamazov_ unless
they were compelled to do so as a matter of fashionable duty. On the other
hand, booms more than anything else make for false estimates. It seems
impossible with many people to praise Dostoevsky without saying that he is
greater than Tolstoy or Turgenev. Oscar Wilde enthusiasts, again, invite
us to rejoice, not only over that pearl of triviality, _The Importance of
Being Earnest_, but over a blaze of paste jewelry like _Salome_.
Similarly, Donne worshippers are not content to ask us to praise Donne's
gifts of fancy, analysis and idiosyncratic music. They insist that we
shall also admit that he knew the human heart better than Shakespeare. It
may be all we like sheep have gone astray in this kind of literary riot.
And so long as the exaggeration of a good writer's genius is an honest
personal affair, one resents it no more than one resents the large nose or
the bandy legs of a friend. It is when men begin to exaggerate in
herds--to repeat like a lesson learned the enthusiasm of others--that the
boom becomes offensive. It is as if men who had not large noses were to
begin to pretend that they had, or as if men whose legs were not bandy
were to pretend that they were, for fashion's sake. Insincerity is the one
entirely hideous artistic sin--whether in the creation or in the
appreciation of art. The man who enjoys reading _The Family Herald_, and
admits it, is nearer a true artistic sense than the man who is bored by
Henry James and denies it: though, perhaps, hypocrisy is a kind of homage
paid to art as well as to virtue. Still, the affectation of literary
rapture offends like every other affectation. It was the chorus of
imitative rapture over Synge a few years ago that helped most to bring
about a speedy reaction against him. Synge was undoubtedly a man of fine
genius--the genius of gloomy comedy and ironic tragedy. His mind delved
for strangenesses in speech and imagination among people whom the new age
had hardly touched, and his discoveries were sufficiently magnificent to
make the eyes of any lover of language brighten. His work